1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication device, a communication method and a communication system, and in particular, to a communication device, a communication method and a communication system able to suppress unnecessary electrical power consumption in, for example, high-speed proximity communication.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, proximity communication, where wireless communication is performed by non-contact at a close distance using IC (Integrated Circuit) cards or the like, is used for, for example, electronic commuter tickets, electronic money and the like, and also, mobile phone devices, which have an electronic commuter ticket or electronic money function using proximity communication, are in widespread use.
Proximity communication has been standardized as, for example, ISO/IEC 14443 or ISO/IEC 18092 (referred to below as NFC (Near Field Communication)).
As a communication method performing communication which complies with the NFC standards, for example, there are communication methods called type A, type B and type C.
For example, the type C method is adopted in the IC card system called FeliCa (registered trademark) of Sony Corp. who is the present applicant.
However, for example, the type C above adopts a 13.56 MHz carrier and performs proximity communication at a communication speed of 212 kbps (kilo bits per second) or 424 kbps.
Additionally, in the type A and the type B, proximity communication is performed at a communication speed of 106 kbps which is a lower speed than in type C.
As per above, since the NFC communication speed is a low speed at approximately a few hundred kbps, it is not able to be said that it is suited for the transmission of large amounts of data such as image contents.
On the other hand, in NFC, it is possible to specify the communication parties and perform mutual authentication only by holding an IC card over a RW (Reader/Writer).
Therefore, a handover is proposed (for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2009-218845) where communication is begun initially by NFC, and after that, the communication method is changed to high-speed communication which has a communication speed faster than NFC such as wireless LAN or Bluetooth (registered trademark).